Officer who killed mall attack shooter hailed as a hero
ALLEN, Texas — The shooter with neo-Nazi leanings who killed eight people at a suburban Dallas shopping mall brought eight legally purchased guns to the scene, apparently chose his victims randomly and was shot dead by police within four minutes, authorities said Tuesday.
The Allen police officer who shot and killed 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, ending Saturday’s attack, acted heroically and saved “countless lives” through his quick action, Hank Sibley, the regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference. Authorities said the officer is still processing what happened and isn’t ready to have his name made public.
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“If he hadn’t have been there, I think we’d have had a much more severe situation,” Sibley said.
The investigation into Garcia’s motive is ongoing, but he expressed neo-Nazi beliefs, Sibley said, adding that Garcia had no criminal history before he opened fire at Allen Premium Outlets.
Sibley said it seems Garcia “targeted the location, rather than a specific group of people,” adding that, “he was very random in the people he killed.”
“The big question that we’re dealing with right now is, ‘What’s his motive? Why did he do this?’” Sibley said. “Well, the big question is, we don’t know. That’s what the investigation is trying to find out.”
Posts by Garcia on a Russian social networking site suggest that he planned for weeks before he launched the attack in Allen, a diverse community of about 100,000 people roughly 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of downtown Dallas.
Garcia researched when the mall was busiest — Saturday afternoons — and posted photos on social media in mid-April of a store near where he ultimately began shooting people.
